Categories
BloodStar Shadows on the Stars

Shadows on the Stars

The BloodStar Sagas

REVERIE STATION:

I slid out of the drift at the edge of Highgate System, and settled in for the long orbit to Reverie Station.  I was impatient to arrive, but it’s a dusty system, and gets worse the farther in you go.  Even out of the ecliptic, it can be risky.  This wasn’t my first trip to Highgate.

Fortunately, Highgate was on my side of the primary, and I docked more or less without incident.  A little carbon scoring on the hull from orbital dust, but nothing TANS wasn’t used to.

Highgate is a toxic hell.  The original inhabitants poisoned their entire atmosphere in one giant fuck-up.  It’s still a mystery what they were trying to do: climate control, an experimental weapon, a new kind of space drive – it’s still being debated by those who debate such things.

Whatever it was, it laid waste to their world virtually overnight.  Corrosive winds now scour the desiccated landscape and exploration is difficult and dangerous.  While technically Precursors, the Highgaters weren’t particularly advanced, their tech not being much better, on the average, than ours.  So tomb-raiding and grubbing are dangerous and largely unprofitable.  A few wealthy collectors in the Forge still pay for unusual artifacts, but only as morbid curiosities.

For Reverie Station, that’s a blessing and a curse.  The population of grubs and black marketers is minimal, but they are the most desperate and dangerous of that breed.

The true purpose of Reverie, and its halo of orbital factories and labs, is the development and production of extreme survival gear.  The surface of Highgate is the perfect test environment – if it can survive there, it can survive anywhere.

The air on Reverie always seems to have an odd chemical taint, an often nose-stinging astringency that is likely a combination of incidental contamination from Highgate, and whatever they use to try to counteract its worst effects.

I prefer to keep my visits to Reverie as brief as possible.

I was here to meet one Ayako Thorn, a reputed priestess and madwoman.  She possessed, I was told, both hard data and mystic insights into what was happening at Bulwark.  Whatever was unfolding there, the local authorities were keeping a tight lid on useful details.  I had to pass near Reverie on my way to Bulwark, so I judged a brief stopover might be worth the trouble.

It took me a while to unearth word of Ayako, but I know the pressure points on Reverie.  The news, however, was not auspicious.  Only a day before I arrived, Ayako apparently stole an acquaintance’s runabout, and flew down to the planet’s surface, landing somewhere near a towering block of ruins known as the Shard.  When others arrived, she was nowhere to be found, and the would-be rescuers were not properly equipped for an extended search in the noxious atmosphere.  The station authorities, such as they were, were not remotely interested in Ayako’s fate, and no one else seemed willing to risk a second trip.

I pondered this over a pipe and a pint at the local speakeasy.  On the one hand, I had been told that Ayako “might” have information bearing on the situation at Bulwark – there had been no guarantee nor specific instructions to meet with her.  I could put time into an attempt to locate and rescue Ayako, only to put myself, my ship and my mission at risk for nothing.  She was most likely dead, after all.

On the other hand, it galled me that the woman had simply been abandoned to her fate.  Rumor had it that she had assembled a piecemeal environment suit over a period of months, and it was barely possible that she was still alive.  There were places in the Highgater ruins where one might find shelter from the worst of the acidic winds, and even a ramshackle suit would have air for at least 72 hours.

And the coiling pipe smoke seemed to whisper that her knowledge – and her rescue – were urgent.

I sighed.  Trust me, I’m more villain than hero, but there are still some things I won’t let pass.

I stowed my pipe, settled the bill, and made for the docks and the TANSTAAFL.

A few words about Typhon BloodStar.

Because his name is a bit overblown, I want to touch on a few of the inspirations for Typhon.

This fine fellow shares DNA with such worthies as Adam Reith, Earl Dumarest, Conway Costigan, Harcourt Fenton Mudd, Slippery Jim DiGriz and even Indian Jones and Han Solo. And many another space opera anti/hero, famous and infamous alike.

“Typhon” is a nod to the character in Zelazny’s Creatures of Light and Darkness.

“BloodStar” is inspired by the names of the “Beasts” in Brian Stableford’s epic sci-fi/fantasy trilogy Dies Irae. Characters therein boast memorable names such as Hellwind, Fireshadow, Starfury, etc. (And yes, I think those books inspired the name Skywalker, too.)

Typhon’s origin is similar to the protagonist in William Rotsler’s The Raven and the Hawk (Analog, Sep 74). He was just another mook scratching out a living as an asteroid miner when he discovered a dormant Precusor gunship. The telepathic AI, desperately lonely after thousands of purposeless years, immediately bonded with Typhon, and the two of them soon found themselves embroiled in all sorts of tomfoolery.

(Why the ship is now called the TANSTAAFL is a story yet to be told…)

Typhon – with the assistance of TANS – made a good living for a couple of decades as a secure courier and “extractionist”, willing to get people out of situations most others wouldn’t attempt, the superior tech of TANS giving him a massive advantage.

But, in his time, Typhon has seen more than enough of the ancient, non-human evil that haunts the Forge. When you actually see the risen dead, they cease to be myth, rumor or superstition. There is something in the Forge that is alien even to our reality, something not dissimilar, perhaps, to the Otherlords.

Now he does a lot of “pro bono” work, traveling to the edges of human habitation in the Forge to help those who are afflicted by darkness and death.

Although not mentioned above with the other inspirational characters, Typhon is probably closest in demeanor to Paladin, from Have Gun, Will Travel. He seems easy-going, even pleasant and garrulous. But he’ll put a blaster bolt through your left eye in a cold heartbeat, if you absolutely insist. He lucked into a situation and got wealthy from it, but now feels compelled to honor that good fortune by helping others.

Categories
Musings

Last Train to Carcosa

 

You have just witnessed a stage production of The King in Yellow.

You know you must reach Carcosa or go mad and perish.

You notice a message, nearly illegible, scrawled amongst other graffiti:

LAST TRAIN TO CARCOSA: MIDNIGHT

You immediately set out for the Station.

But making your way across Nyxopolis becomes a nightmare, as the avatars and minions of Nyarlothotep attempt to hunt you down before you can board the Train.

What’s more, Nyarlothotep itself is manipulating reality in the City, so that it becomes a constantly shifting maze of impossibly moving buildings and roads.

It’s a distinct possibility you will die trying to reach the Station.

But if you aren’t onboard the Last Train to Carcosa, it will be a certainty.

Categories
Ironsworn

Rhovanion and the Tale of the Goat-Hurler

 

This is a prompt from a random table of events. Initially, I was going to re-roll, then I thought, what the heck, lets see where this goes.

Ironsworn is the sibling game to Starforge.

“A large burly man has started a daily ritual of throwing a goat at the side of a local noble’s house. He is not damaging the house, so he is not doing anything that will make the local law enforcement arrest him. However, the noble wants him dealt with, and will pay you to get rid of him.”

Curiously, no one knows what happened to all the hurled – and presumably dead – goats.

Turns out it’s the same goat, over and over.

The goat is cursed – it’s a “misfortune attractor”, and whoever owns it will suffer accordingly. The current owner, Mortimir, was a prosperous farmer before he bought the goat from the shady merchant, Yaldanel. But since then, his fortunes have steadily declined, and hardship has been his lot.

A shaman identified the goat as the cause, and Morti attempted to kill it. But the curse makes it an undying thing. Cut it up, burn it, bury it under an avalanche, and it’ll be back the next morning. Morti tried crating it up and sending it south with a caravan, but it was back within a week.

So Morti is making it as clear as he can to Yaldanel that he wants the merchant to take back the goat. But the latter is aware of the curse – knew what he was doing. He refuses to even acknowledge selling the beast in the first place.

Every morning, Morti smashes the goat against Yaldanel’s wall with bone-shattering force, and stalks away. Minutes later, the goat jumps to its feet and trots after him.

There is, however, a rumor that a mage residing in a wilderness keep a few days’ journey to the north may be able to dispel the curse. There’s even a chance that the mage can “reverse the polarity” of the goat, as it were, and turn it into a fortune attractor.

Morti’s last remaining bit of wealth is a large ruby from his adventuring days. He implores Rho to take the ruby and the goat to the mage and ask him to remove the curse. If Morti tries to make the trip, he will likely die from the curse itself. And while the curse will remain with him in Stoneford, Rho should be free of it, despite his continued proximity to the goat.

At least he needn’t worry about the indestructible goat, except to keep it tethered. It appeared happy to go where it was led, only returning to Morti when left to its own devices.

So a few days on the road with an odd sort of goat.

What could go wrong?

Categories
Ramble On

Baleful Things

 

  • Balefires:
    • Storms and tides of strange energies that surge back and forth across the Forge, appearing suddenly, sweeping across systems and worlds, disappearing again, leaving chaos in their wake.  Certain pieces of Precursor tech seem to respond to their presence, but little else is known, except for the jeremiad of woes that they bring to the Forge.
  • Baleshine:
    • Idiomatic for the unusual abilities that some appear to gain from balefire exposure.
  • Balespawn:
    • Lifeforms warped and twisted by too much exposure to balefire.  Spawn are vicious, horrifying mutants easily recognizable by their many asymmetries and  deformities, easily distinguishable from the indigenous lifeforms they once were.  They are normally hostile and aggressive, but can sometimes be intimidated or even frightened away by displays of force and/or “magic”.
Categories
Ramble On

The Itani Gate

 

The Itani Gate is a Precursor artifact, but no one knows if it was created by one of the Precursor races from the Forge, or an unknown third.  It provides instantaneous transit for spaceships from the Itani System in the galactic plane to the Forge some 1700 light years above.

The Gate is ancient – none know how old.  It is generally reliable but not without its risks.  The Gate has been known to “flicker” when in use, resulting in the destruction of the transiting ship.  Others have simply disappeared into the Gate field – passing into one end, but never coming out the other, like a ghost train on Old Earth, vanishing into a tunnel beneath the hills.

When it became evident that the Forge was far from some bright new frontier, and that the most common reward for risking the Gate was a significantly abbreviate lifespan, interest in transiting waned.  The Gate structure itself remained something of an enormous tourist attraction.  But in the decades preceding the coming of the Otherlords, only the hardiest and most dedicated of scientists, prospectors and would-be tomb-raiders bothered to make the passage.

Early in the war, refugees used the Gate to flee to the Forge when they could.  But for many, it was safer and easier to head further along the galactic plane, rather than risking a passage through the thick of the struggle.  The bulk of the Exodus occurred in the years immediately following the war.

Itani Gate was always isolated, but since many populated systems near it were eradicated, it is even more so now, a circumstance that further reduces traffic through the Gate

Categories
StarForge

The Otherlords

 

The records tell us that the Otherlords broke into our reality, our space/time continuum, from somewhere else, from “Outside”.  To those who saw them and lived, they appeared as moon-sized maelstroms of roiling energy and matter, and wherever they encountered life – or even the potential for life – they annihilated it.  They scoured planets down to the bedrock, leaving only the bones and grave-dust of corrupt, contaminated worlds.

And yet, in crossing from their dimension into ours, the Otherlords in fact put themselves at a disadvantage.  As immense and powerful as they were, they made themselves subject to the laws of our universe when they entered it. 

Under the lash of imminent extinction, humanity created and deployed weapons of horrifying power and scope.  Sun-lances that generated CMEs from a system primary star, then focused them like a laser.  Singularity cannons that lobbed artificial black holes.  And the worst – dark antimatter.

But these – and more – were used at a cost.  Sun-lances left stars dangerously unstable; singularity cannons twisted the very fabric of space/time, and dark anti-matter weapons left a lingering taint, a contamination not unlike that of the Otherlords themselves.  Fighting fire with fire, perhaps.

Bit by bit, the invaders were destroyed or pushed back to their origin point, an otherwise unremarkable mass point drifting in the void.  If they expected to find a way out of our universe, back to their home, they were disappointed.  Their doorway had closed.  They were pummeled into memory.

Categories
StarForge

The Forge

 

Hundreds of years ago, humans fled a cataclysm in their home galaxy, and migrated to a globular cluster 1700 light years above the galactic plane.  They called the cluster the Starforge, or simply the Forge.

Prompts and other bits lifted directly from the rules are in blue.  My comments are in green.

  • Cataclysm: Inter-dimensional entities invaded our reality.  Beings of chaotic energy.  Titanic creatures of horrific power.
    • The human interstellar domain had just begun to flower when inter-dimensional entities invaded our reality.  Not quite the Great Old Ones, but close enough.  In the ensuing war to push these Otherlords back from whence they came, large swaths of settled space were devastated – not just laid waste, but tainted by the evil from Outside.
  • Exodus: Mysterious alien gates provided instantaneous one-way passage to the Forge.
    • Entire planetary populations – or what was left of them – had to be relocated in the aftermath of the war.  Most pushed on past the existing borders of Known Space in search of untainted worlds to settle.  But a handful of diverse groups decided that one Hell was as good as another, and elected to risk the Itani Gate and see for themselves just how inhospitable the Forge was.
  • Communities: We have made our mark in this galaxy, but the energy storms we call balefires threaten to undo that progress, leaving our communities isolated and vulnerable.
    • Legends now tell us that the Crossing was made by one huge fleet of refugees, but the reality is that there were successive waves over the next decade.  Once word filtered back about the true nature of the Forge, passages trickled off.  Now they are rare.  Some in the galactic plane – “planers” – still seek the Forge hoping to find Atlantis or El Dorado.  A few remain.  Fewer still return.  Most die.
  • Law: No prompt really fit.  Based loosely on Traveler and the Dumarest chronicles.
    • The nature and weight of laws tend to reflect the local population density – where there are many people relatively close together, laws are stricter, more numerous and more enthusiastically enforced.  Where the population is thin, not so much.  Even in the same star system, there can be metropolitan centers that are safe and orderly, as well as outposts with a more frontier lifestyle.  A general Covenant is more or less adhered to, particularly in the case of offworlders.  Locals may wish they were that fortunate.
  • Religion: Our faith is as diverse as our people.
    • Many refugee waves that were religiously heterogenous soon “found religion” together in the Forge.  It is a place that challenges one’s fundamental understanding of reality.  Many have created semi-religions, centered around  the ritualization of practices that helped a particular group survive in the Forge.
  • Magic: Unnatural energies flow through the Forge. Magic and science are two sides of the same coin.
    • Soon after our arrival, some displayed the ability to harness the Forge’s energies. Today, those with “baleshine” invoke this power to manipulate matter or see beyond the veils of our own universe. But this can be a corrupting force, and the most powerful mystics are respected and feared in equal measure.
      • But it’s NOT “the Force” – it doesn’t depend on being infected with an embarrassing blood disorder.  It appears to manifest in certain people who are exposed to balefire, but that is still speculation, albeit based on long observation.  Abilities are generally modest, and often unreliable.  Empathic reading, psychometry, life sense, limited prescience, limited telekinesis, limited healing and so on.  Abilities are so random, unpredictable and haphazard that they have thus far defied all attempts to study or cultivate them in any organized fashion.  One beneficial ability that is fortunately quite common among the affected is the ability to sense impending balestorms, which comes in quite handy when navigating and exploring deep space. 
  • Communication and Data: Information is life. We rely on space-borne couriers to transport messages and data across the vast distances between settlements.
    • Direct communication and transmissions beyond the near-space of a ship or outpost are impossible. Digital archives are available at larger outposts, but the information is not always up-to-date or reliable. Therefore, the most important communications and discoveries are carried by couriers who swear vows to see that data safely to its destination.
  • Medicine: To help offset a scarcity of medical supplies and knowledge, the resourceful technicians we call riggers create basic organ and limb replacements.
    • Medical technology tends to follow the same curve as law – the more people, the better, on average, the medical tech and care.  Advanced medical tech depends on advanced systems, and the Forge always plays Hell with those.  Starships are shielded, and can even dodge the balefires, but space stations, planets and moons generally can’t.  Medical transport is a lucrative business in the Forge.
      • This prompt seems to be written specifically to introduce “cyborgism” into the plot, a la any number of cyberpunk games.
  • AI: We no longer have access to advanced computer systems.  The energies of the Forge corrupt advanced systems.  Instead, we must rely on the seers we call Adepts. 
    • Good luck with AI in the Forge.  Even shielded spacecraft are not completely immune from these energy tides and storms, and often rely on evasion to survive them.  Unfortunately, due to the physics involved, shields cannot be used to cover planets or planetary locations.  And so far no thickness of native rock or combination of materials has proven completely resistant to balefires.  Only the Precursor metal known as “black iron” is proof against them, and it is prohibitively rare and difficult to work.
  • Wars: No prompt fit.  When war does break out, it has thus far been limited to on-planet and in-systems fracases. 
    • Where there are humans, there will be conflict.  But wars in the old sense, like the war against the Otherlords, are almost unknown.  It’s difficult enough surviving in a stellar environment that is actively trying to kill you at every other moment.  War is expensive and depletes all sides, leaving them less capable of enduring the Forge.
  • Lifeforms: This is a perilous and often inhospitable galaxy, but life finds a way.
    • For the most part, a planetary magnetic field will shield organic life from the worst effects of the balefires.  For the most part.  Life can be found everywhere in the Forge, even in the most hostile environments.  But life on worlds subject to strong, chronic balefires can become warped and aberrant.  Often Precursor ruins on these blasted worlds are occupied by such balespawn.
  • Precursors: Over eons, a vast number of civilizations rose and fell within the Forge. Today, the folk we call grubs—scavenger crews and audacious explorers—delve into the mysterious monuments and ruins of those ancient beings.
    • Two major non-human races occupied the Forge before humans.  The first, known generically as the Elder, existed over 500 million years ago, and all that is left of them are the so-called vaults, a general term for the monolithic structures they left behind, some sealed, some empty and a rare few containing artifacts that can be studied.  The second race came and went 50 million years ago, and are known as the Younger.  They were able to reverse-engineer and mimic a certain level of Elder tech, and learned to use some that they could not replicate, but much remained unfathomable even to them.  Some speculate that Younger meddling with Builder tech created the balefires.  Because they never achieved the technological heights of the Elder, there are actually fewer Younger ruins remaining – their works simply didn’t endure as well as those of the Elder.
      • Players are encouraged to alter prompts to fit their vision of the milieu, so I’ve reduced “a vast number” to two.  Maybe one more, but we’ll have to see.
  • Horrors: The strange energies of the Forge give unnatural life to the dead.
    • Balefires and Precursor tech can warp organic life.  The worst of them can return the dead to a semblance of life.  The phenomenon is not understood in the least, but it is real.  The undead are real.
      • The inclusion of the undead was such an unexpected prompt that I had to include it.  The weirder the better.
Categories
Ramble On

Tales of the Iron Mistress

We see a lot of pastiches and homages to the various supporting characters in Dracula and their imagined descendants.1  Except for one:  Quincy Morris. 

Which is kind of odd, seeing as Quincy delivers one of the killing blows to the Count, the one to the heart, with his Bowie knife.

But wait – aren’t vampires immune to mundane weapons?

Well, yes, of course.  But who says Quincy’s knife was mundane?

What if it was, in fact, the fabled knife of James Bowie himself, supposedly lost after the siege of the Alamo?

If it was, in fact, the legendary Iron Mistress, then it was made of literal star-stuff, meteoric iron that came from the fathomless depths of outer space.  Or perhaps beyond.

What better to slay an otherworldly monster than an otherworldly weapon?

Sadly, Quincy dies from wounds sustained in the fight against the vampire, and nothing more is said, in the story, about the knife.

But we can speculate that, as was often customary in such circumstances, particularly for a minor hero, Quincy’s possessions were returned to his family in Texas.  There, perhaps, the knife occupied an honored place on a wall of similar memories, and waited, down through the generations, before being sold off like so much clutter, in an estate sale.

Until some hapless nebbish buys it at a yard sale and (through events and circumstances yet to be written) finds that it is so much more than a mere priceless antique.

1 As far as we know from the text, Quincy had no children. However, in this context, “descendants” are considered to be anyone in his familial bloodline.

Categories
Ramble On

The Black Castle… My Way

In The Black Castle (1952) Sir Ronald Burton, a British gentleman, investigates the disappearance of two of his friends at the Austrian estate of the sinister Count von Bruno, who is hunting unsuspecting English visitors a la The Most Dangerous Game, for past grievances against the British Empire.

Burton arranges to be one of Bruno’s “guests”, although Bruno knows nothing of his friendship with past victims.  This all comes out in the denouement, when Burton reveals the truth to Bruno just before he kills him in revenge for his friends and countrymen.

In my twisted version, Burton is pursuing the two men he claims are “friends” to exact vengeance of his own.  He tracks them to Bruno’s castle, and when he realizes Bruno has robbed him of his vengeance after so many years and so many hardships, he kills the nefarious Count.

Categories
DD

Notes on Loner

In Loner, you create story momentum through a repeating loop of prompts:

  • Where are you?
  • What do you see?
  • Who else is there?
  • What’s going on?
  • What is your response?

Then you can – if you want to – generate random answers to all but the last which, one would hope, you want to decide for yourself.

Loner uses 2d6 in series, which generates values from 1-1 to 6-6, so 36 possibilities, which may seem low, but prompts usually don’t come in isolation, and you are often rolling on more than one table, to get values like “nervous smuggler” or “disgraced soldier”.  IDK the math, but combining tables ups the total possibilities.

And it’s in these tables that you can customize the game to pretty much any milieu you want.  A “Random Vehicle” table in sci-fi is going to be a lot diff from sword and sorcery. 

This is a snapshot of the tables in Kwaidan.

  • ADVENTURE SEEDS
  • HAUNTED ARTIFACTS
  • MYSTICAL LOCATIONS
  • RANDOM EVENTS
  • SUPERNATURAL OMENS
  • CURSED VILLAGES
  • WANDERING SPIRITS
  • MYSTERIOUS VISITORS
  • RITUALS & CEREMONIES
  • FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
  • SHAPESHIFTERS & ILLUSIONS
  • SEALED AWAY
  • SPIRITUAL BARGAINS
  • ECHOES OF THE PAST
  • GHOSTLY PROCESSIONS
  • SACRED RELICS.
  • YOKAI CONFLICTS
  • BLOOD TIES & FAMILY CURSES
  • NATURAL DISASTERS & OMENS
  • THE WORLD BETWEEN
  • INSPIRATION TABLES

Spacer doesn’t have an index of tables, but it has, for instance, tables for Stars, Planets, Moons and Asteroids and so on.  Very different from Kwiadan’s tables.

(BTW, “Spells” appearing on the Spacer CS/char sheet appears to be a boo-boo, as that is the only hit on Spells I can find in the rules.)

You can also tweak the character structure a little.  Kwaidan adds Chi, Honor and Corruption to the basic Loner character design.  My (eventual) Norse adaptation will add Wyrd and Ond to the characters, the latter being kind of the Norse “mana”.

I wonder how much of this design concept came out of OOP.  If you step back, it’s like the core rules are the interface, and the various genre modules are the implementations thereof.  You can extend the class beyond the interface, but you have to conform to certain loose base requirements.

The number and nature of those tables is not a hard requirement – Kwaidan has many more tables than Spacer, but then esoteric Japanese folklore is not as speculative as sci-fi, there are certain real-world precedents.

Dirge is fun, and Kwaidan is just dripping, potentially, with atmosphere, but eventually I’m probably going to do a Norse-themed mod.